Facebook CEO sees augmented reality's future in the camera

Zuckerberg said Facebook has "a lot of work" to do.

For example, he said that people visiting a restaurant could see what friends had to say about it, or leave messages for others.

Augmented reality has been in the air for some time and got its first big hit a year ago with Pokémon Go, a game in which users use their smartphones to chase digital creatures through the real world. CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed how the new camera functions will work in Facebook's various apps on the conference stage.

And people couldn't help but notice that the subtext of this vision seemed to be all about one thing: Facebook crushing Snap. While it'll take at least a decade to fully play out, the stuff Facebook is talking about today is just one more milestone on the slow march towards the death of the smartphone, and the rise of even weirder and wilder futures. The incident alarmed many about the unlawful use of the feature and how Facebook is not able to handle it.

At the company's F8 conference he described efforts to harness object recognition technology and Global Positioning System to provide users with information about the places they happen to be, or just have fun - for example with the kinds of picture enhancements associated with Snapchat.

This type of information card could actually prove to be really helpful, and it's hard to even imagine all of the different use cases for something like this.

Facebook shared a video with a preview of what AR Studio will look like on its Facebook For Developers page on Tuesday. In addition, the company pointed out that it prohibits spammers and removes hate speech from its platform. With Snapchat posing a competitive threat, Zuckerberg is expected to discuss his plans for boosting the advertising appeal of its rapidly growing Instagram photo-sharing app and outline new photo-sharing features to take on Snapchat. This means you'll be able to discover all sorts of insane stuff while checking out the new camera filters as they're developed.

During his presentation, Zuckerberg showed examples of a smartphone being used to digitally alter the physical world, viewed through the lens of a smartphone camera. This proposal comes after the social media website has faced sharp criticism for not doing enough to stop the flow of fake news on its platform during the past US presidential election.

"Over time, I think this is a technology that's going to change how we use our phones and, well, all of technology", Zuckerberg claimed. What that means for the rest of us non-developers in the world is that Facebook will allow people outside of the company to design masks for the site, making the effects more customizable and unique than any other social media platform offering a similar effect.